


Golden Hue

by Haely_Potter



Series: Bending the Universe [8]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M, Implied Death, Mentioned and Implied future Eleven/River Song
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-17
Updated: 2013-10-17
Packaged: 2017-12-29 16:42:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1007698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haely_Potter/pseuds/Haely_Potter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor gets a blast from the past in the form of his tenth self and Rose Tyler just before finding out who River Song is on Demon's Run. Impossibly, their timelines are in a golden hued flux and nothing is certain for them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Golden Hue

"Well then, soldier. How goes the day?" came River's voice from behind him.

The Doctor turned around angrily. "Where the hell have you been? Every time you've asked, I have been there. Where the hell were you today?" he demanded, feeling entitled to call her out on it. He'd been a taxi service to her and now she hadn't even been here when he needed her in turn.

"I couldn't have prevented this," she answered calmly, unrepentant as always.

"You could have tried!" he shouted at her.

"And so, my love, could you," said River before turning to Amy. "I know you're not all right. But hold tight, Amy, because you're going to be," she said with certainty.

"You think I wanted this?" asked the Doctor, gesturing at the bodies littered around them as he walked closer to River. "I didn't do this. This, this wasn't me!" This could have been him, right after Time War, had he not met... well, it hardly mattered anymore, gone now.

"This is exactly you," River said. "All of this. All of it. You make them so afraid. When you began, all those years ago, sailing off to see the universe, did you ever think you'd become this? The man who can turn an army around at the mention of his name. Doctor. The word for "healer" and "wise man" throughout the universe. We get that from you, you know. But if you carry on the way you are, what might that word come to mean? To the people of the Gamma Forests, the word Doctor means "mighty warrior". How far you've come. And now they've taken a child, the child of your best friends, and they're going to turn her into a weapon just to bring you down. And all this, my love, in fear of you."

River's speech closely resembled Davros' speech about him making his companions into soldiers. Martha, a doctor herself, had become a soldier because of him. Rory, a nurse, had become a Roman, a Centurion, because of him. Even Rose had picked up a gun on her journey to find him again. Was that what the Silence feared? That the people around him, his friends, picked up weapons in defence of... what? The right cause? For doing the right thing? Before he lost Rose, no one who hadn't already been a soldier had become one. There had been the Brigadier and Jack and Leela, the soldiers, but after he lost Rose...

The confrontation between River and the Doctor was interrupted by a TARDIS materialising. The sound was exactly the same as the Doctor's TARDIS but the outside colour was a little fader and a different shade and the door lacked the St John's Ambulance sticker. The Doctor, River, Amy, Rory, Madam Vastra and Jenny all stared at the new TARDIS, most frozen where they stood but the Doctor was shaking slightly with conflicting emotions. He didn't know who he wanted to be there, beside himself of course.

The door opened and the voice of his tenth self filled the silence in the hanger bay. "And finally! Barcelona!" he announced as he stepped outside with a flourish, Rose stepping out just behind him. Then he looked around. "Or maybe not. Rose, does this look like Barcelona to you?"

"Not really," said the most beautiful voice in the whole universe. "There's a glaring lack of dogs with no noses." She finally stepped up from behind the past Doctor. "We could always ask the people over there where we are. And when we are. And what's with the bodies."

The past Doctor grinned widely down at her and took her hand, leading her to the Doctor and his motley crew. "Hello, I'm the Doctor. This is Rose. We were just wondering, where are we?"

The Doctor gave him a painful smile and turned to his friends. "Everyone, I'd like you to meet me and," he swallowed, "Rose Tyler," his voice broke slightly, gesturing to the duo. He turned back to them. "This is the asteroid base of Demon's Run, year 5224 and this isn't really a good time for you to be here," he said, firmly keeping his eyes on his past self, not letting them flicker to Rose.

The past Doctor turned to Rose. "It's never a good time to run into myself. I don't normally get along with myself, see. Two and three vehemently hated each other and this one time my first self had to come in and defuse the whole situation. Another time, there were five of me in the same place. Lately though, I seem to be getting the hang of not meeting myself. This though, this seems to be putting an end to my improvement, running into myself like this."

"Oh!" exclaimed Rose with mischievous eyes. "Can we go meet your last self?"

"No!" denied the past Doctor, affronted, before grinning and hugging her close. "You're mine now, he blew his chance."

"Doctor," Rose asked with a theatrical whisper, "are you jealous of yourself?"

"Noo!" moaned the past Doctor. "He had giant ears and a big nose and-and I have hair!"

"You're also thinner and taller and I miss that leather jacket!" teased Rose with a tongue touched smile.

The Doctor couldn't help himself and glanced at Rose and his hand twitched, wishing to reach out and touch her. He wanted to know if they still fit. The way they acted, he'd put them somewhere between Queen Victoria and Sarah Jane, already comfortable of talking of the regeneration but not yet completely sorted through it. That would come after Reinette. He glanced at their timelines and frowned at what he saw. Their whole future was in flux, not just small things, like what they ate for breakfast, but big things too, like the battle of Canary Wharf and Pete's world and twenty-seven planets. The flux stretched out well past the point where his timeline should have looped back to his current self already, but that too, was in flux for the past Doctor. Which really should have been impossible, because once you see on a personal timeline what will be, will be. It was the most basic rule of time travel that he'd learned in the Academy. It was why Time Lords didn't promote meeting oneself as a good thing, because once you did, that was it, no changing it, no take-backs.

But here was Rose and his past self, completely in flux. Their timelines had a funny golden hue to them, the same shade of gold that Rose had shined on the Game Station.

"Oh," he breathed with wide eyes, looking between the two bickering forms from his past in front of him, attracting their attention. "That's impossible," he said with a disbelieving smile.

"What's impossible?" demanded Amy angrily, very stressed out as she was.

The Doctor turned to her with a giddy smile, all the while pointing at the past Doctor and Rose. "Their timelines, they're in flux," he explained enthusiastically and turned back to himself. "They shouldn't be, you know that," he said to himself, "but they are. Timelines are supposed to solidify when you meet yourself, but yours hasn't. I was just checking when in your timelines you were, I don't remember this, I never remember meeting myself until after the meeting... but... this never happened to me!"

"And... that's a good thing?" Rose asked hesitantly.

The Doctor beamed at her. "Oh yes, that means you can still manage things differently from me. Take a look around Rose, what's missing from my life? I've got the TARDIS and my motley crew, but what's missing?"

Both Rose and the past Doctor looked around them and inspected him head to toe.

"Your fashion sense," the past Doctor eventually deadpanned. "A bow-tie, honestly, I thought I was done with the whole clown thing after six."

"I don't know," Rose said thoughtfully. "I kinda like it. Though I could do without the tweed. Maybe a mid nineteenth century velvet coat. That'd be cool." She shrugged. "But that's not what you meant, is it?" she asked the Doctor who nodded. "I guess... your sonic screwdriver?"

The Doctor grinned and took it from his pocket. "Guess again."

"Well, there's a very obvious lack of pink in your li-" she stopped mid sentence, taking in all the faces behind him and noticing one that was missing. "Me. I'm not here. Or, my future self's not here. Where's she?"

That caught the past Doctor's attention as he'd been inspecting the Doctor's friends. "What?" he asked sharply, turning to glare at the Doctor. "You lost Rose?" he growled, hand tightening around Rose's as if to anchor her where she was.

"Of course I  _lost_  her, I wasn't going to leave her behind, now was I?" challenged the Doctor. "There were cybermen and Daleks at the same time. The Rose from my timeline is still alive far as I know but  _lost_  in an alternate universe and you know as well as I do travel between universes is now virtually impossible without destroying both universes." He left out the bit in which Rose had found her way back and that he'd left her behind there again. "But this doesn't mean it will happen to you," he beamed. "Your timelines are in flux and golden hued.  _Bad Wolf_  golden, if you catch my drift."

"You mean...?" the past Doctor frowned before understanding crashed over his face and he grinned. "She sure was a busy little Goddess wasn't she?" he asked, looking down at Rose affectionately.

"Yes, she was indeed," agreed the Doctor, looking at Rose with something most would call pure adoration.

"What are you two talking about?" asked Rose, looking at each of them in turn.

"Nothing," the Doctors said at the same time, grinning at each other. "Oh," the Doctor said, "you might want to check her out. I never gave her any tests and I don't like to think she'd live forever alone in that parallel world. I don't know how the time vortex might have affected her other than made her a being of pure chance, because now I saw her timeline, but she did live when  _we_  died and we held the time vortex for approximately seven seconds."

"Point," shrugged the past Doctor. "I just..."

"I know," nodded the Doctor. And he did know. If the time vortex had somehow changed or hurt Rose, he wouldn't have been able to stand it. So he'd pushed the tests he could have run to the back of his mind, eventually, when nothing seemed to be wrong with her, just forgetting them.

"Doctor, what are you doing?" River asked, a slightly hysterical edge in her voice.

"Rewriting time," he answered her flippantly. "Time Lord, me. Capable of many little tricks." Intellectually he knew she was supposed to be his wife but... his hearts cried for Rose. The fact that she had known his name was what eventually prompted him to leave Rose with the duplicate in the end. But this past Doctor had yet to meet River and have her whisper his name in his ear, so if he acted quickly enough, he could be bonded to Rose by the time they met, negating River's claim. Time Lord politics, can't live with them but they provide a convenient escape route when one looks closely enough. (But first come first served was the main point in many of their laws. First wife was always more important than the second, the second more important than the third, and so on. In this though, his first wife wouldn't hold a candle compared to Rose.)

"And what'll happen to us?" asked Rory, holding his wife close.

"We'll most likely fade in, oh, half-an-hour after Rose and himself leave. They'll live their lives and maybe, in five years, they'll be cooing with you over little Melody Pond. Oh! That's something else, make sure your companions can't become pregnant in the TARDIS, especially while in the time vortex. Apparently it has some unexpected consequences on the child's DNA, making it human plus," the Doctor instructed the past Doctor. Then he said over his shoulder to Amy and Rory: "You can still have her, but please make her on your own time."

"Rude," Rose admonished him, making him beam.

It had been such a long time since Rose scolded him for being rude. "That's me, rude and not ginger."

"Quite," agreed Rose. Her smile became tender. "I... " she elbowed the past Doctor to make him let her go and he playfully scowled at her as she stepped closer to the Doctor. "I'm glad you still like me, even after regenerating again."

"Oh Rose," he said quietly and his right hand rose to stroke her cheek. "I so much more than like you but... I think he's the one who should tell you that," he said, his eyes flickering to the past Doctor over her shoulder.

Her eyes widened at his confession. "How long?" she wanted to know.

"Oh, it happened somewhere between the end of the World and blowing up Downing Street," he admitted. "You?"

"Utah and meeting dad," she blushed. "I'd been intrigued since you walked away from me with that plastic arm."

"And you still managed to say no at first," he gave a short laugh.

"Not "no", "can't" has a completely different meaning," she pointed out and leaned slightly to the hand still stroking her cheek. "And you came back."

"No second chances, except for Rose Tyler," he grinned, making her laugh. He then pulled her into a tight hug. "My precious, sweet, impossible Rose Tyler," he murmured into her hair, eyes closed and breathing in her unique fragrance. "I miss you so much."

"Maybe not after this," she whispered back and he let her words comfort him.

"Maybe not," he agreed.

Eventually the past Doctor cleared his throat meaningfully and they pulled back, grinning. The Doctor pressed a lingering kiss to her forehead and then pushed her towards the past Doctor. She took his hand again and smiled a knowing smile up at him while he looked at her with curiosity.

"What'd he say?" he asked.

"Oh, something you're not quite ready to admit just yet," she answered and winked at the Doctor. The past Doctor's response was cut off when her phone rang. "Frequent flying privileges," she explained to the Doctor's staring friends when she was fishing her phone from her pocket. The Doctor winced. The last person he'd done that for had been Martha and if he hadn't been certain they'd fade fairly soon, he might have been afraid of Amy's tongue lashing. "It's Mickey," Rose said, glancing at the past Doctor who huffed.

"Tell you stupid boyfriend we're busy," he grouched and she grinned at him knowingly before answering the call.

"Hello... What was that? Speak slower, I don't understand you... An alien? In London? You're joshing me. *eye roll* Really? That is pretty weird... Yeah... Okay, we'll be there soon. Don't do anything stupid, like get swapped with living plastic, okay? ...Yeah, see ya soon, bye," she ended the call. "Mickey thinks aliens have taken over a school in London. Apparently it's in a not-so-stellar neighborhood but their results have gone up astronomically since they got a new head teacher. He's going to give us the four-one-one soon as we get there. He said called me on February 10th so, I guess we're also scheduled for a trip to my mum's," she told the past Doctor.

"Well, it seems work is calling," the past Doctor said and waved his fair wells to them. "I hope I'll see you all again."

"Rose," the Doctor called. "One last thing. You know how I'm a little over nine hundred years old?"

"Yea?" she asked over her shoulder.

"Well, nine hundred years is a long time to be whizzing about all of time and space on my own, so..." he trailed off.

"I'm not the first one to travel with you?" she finished for him, making him nod rapidly without saying a word. "Okay. Thanks for telling me."

"Anytime, Rose Tyler," he said quietly as his past self and Rose entered their TARDIS, closing the door behind them. "Anytime, anything at all for you my only love."

"You're in love with her," Madam Vastra said in awe.

He turned around with a small smile on his face, wringing his hands. "Oh yes. It took less than three days. Imagine that. Nine-hundred-year-old war hardened Time Lord and a naive nineteen-year-old human girl. Now, two things can happen: the adjustments in the timeline can be small and we'll just have a few different memories or the changes are huge and we'll fade completely without knowing it, leaving behind a psychic echo to ourselves in that new timeline. So if anyone has anything they've wanted to do or say something to someone here, now might be the perfect time."

"What about Melody?" asked Amy.

"Well, you just heard me," the Doctor said and waved at the disappearing TARDIS. "I told him not to let you get pregnant on the TARDIS which means Melody Pond's DNA is normal and therefore she is of no interest to the Silence, letting you and Rory raise her in peace in Leadworth or wherever you're going to build your nest. Next question or comment?"

"Well, you just completely rewrote my life," River sighed from beside his cot.

"How so?" he asked, frowning. River was supposed to be completely independent from his decisions.

"Can't you read?" she asked him, glancing down at the cot and the gold filigree on the sides.

"Oh," he said, reading the name of the next inhabitant of the cot. Gallifreyan was a complex language and Melody Pond and River Song were written the same way. "But that would mean..." He glanced at Amy and Rory.

"Yes," she smirked.

"And that we..."

"Yes."

"Oh... Ew..."


End file.
